Marp turning 18 soon...

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BeeJay
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Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by BeeJay »

Marp soon to turn 18! Say what!! Really?!? Way to make me feel even older!!!

Unless I can't add correctly, and dates always cause me problems, Marp turns 18 in three weeks time. Unfortunately I'll have no internet soon, for a few weeks, and therefore won't be around 'virtually speaking' on the day itself. However, given that 18 is the legal drinking age in a number of jurisdictions, including mine, I'll be sure to have a quiet ale or two to celebrate the occasion of Marp's 'coming-of-age'. Hard to believe that it has been nearly 18 years of score reviewing and submissions, manually initially until Zwax put the automated submission features into Marp. I guess I hassled Zwax too much in the early days as he got sick of me emailing him each day with another batch of scores that I'd downloaded and checked, so he could mark them as confirmed, as it wasn't long after this that he made me one of the first independent confirmers, maybe even the first person other than Zwax with that access? At that point I went into Barthax mode™ and started reviewing scores left, right and centre to try and keep almost every score confirmed.... no hope of one person keeping up with score submissions now. A brief stint as one of the editors early on, albeit with less spare time to put into it than I had hoped, and no doubt many, many more game submissions to come. Ah Marp, you're such a wonderfully understanding 'mistress' on which to waste spare time, even after long periods of absence from gaming.... not forgetting of course the awesome Mame, without which Marp would not exist and those Marpers with more years on the clock wouldn't be able to reminisce about the hours we spent slotting twennies, quarters, 10p, etc into those wonderful glowing machines in our favourite local arcade machine establishment!!

Long live the Marp community, and good gaming one and all to any of you reading this!!

Cheers,
BeeJay.
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AL
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by AL »

Nice Brian! And she/he (MARP) doesn't look any older....bravo! Still looking good after all these years!

Happy 18th MARP! (When is the day? Chris? Brian?) A few birthday uploads be nice :)



Slán,




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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by Cicca »

I can't believe....time flies.... 8O
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by BeeJay »

AL wrote:(When is the day? Chris? Brian?) A few birthday uploads be nice :)
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by AL »

Cheers Brian!






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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by Frankie »

Nice way to remind the rest of us how old we are getting :D
Just looked in my MAME book of records, and my first submission on MARP was for Rally X on the 12/2-2000. So, I've been here more or less for 15 of those 18 years. Holy cow :D
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by Phil Lamat »

My score on Hustle is from 26 Jan 99 !
I don't know if I have something from 1998, filter by date is (still) not working
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by bmclean »

Thanks Zwax and BeeJay, this site has been a lot of fun. It's hard to believe this place has been around close to two decades! May it live on for a long time yet and provide entertainment, competition and fun for all of us who still love old arcade games.

I'm not sure of the actual first submission, but my oldest recording currently up appears to be a 1CC of Repulse back on Oct 3 of '99. I have good memories of playing that one in the local bowling alley as a kid.
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by GJTMarper »

Phil Lamat wrote:My score on Hustle is from 26 Jan 99 !
I don't know if I have something from 1998, filter by date is (still) not working
The earliest one I've found (out of 2,680 hits! 8O ) with the search is a submission for the game Kaos dated 13 Jan 99 recorded with Win 33. That might've been recorded in 98, but it wasn't submitted until 99.
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by AL »

Mine was Rainbow Islands, 23 Aug 1999!





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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by BeeJay »

Looks like my first inp was Bomb Jack, no surprise there, on the 23rd February 1998, back in the manual upload days where you had to e-mail your inp files to Chris.
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by Cicca »

My first submission was 15 Dec 98....an amidar score.... :D
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by mahlemiut »

My first was 15th June 1998. Bobble Bobble (probably because that was the only decently working version at the time).
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INNUENDO
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by INNUENDO »

"Wed Dec 27 05:52:58 2000 : Brian McLean (taz) confirmed the shinobi score of 578430 by shinobi, son of phoenix (rsm)"

My first play on MARP.

In that year of 2000, I was searching like a crazy some tips, tricks or super gameplays. I´ve found MARP and great scores to watch using the emulator. When I´ve learned to record and to playback... Changed my life! I´ve learned a lot with the great players from here and got impressed with some skills.

18 years...
Long life to good games
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Re: Marp turning 18 soon...

Post by BBH »

I'll tell my story of how I came to find MARP...

Back in 1998 when emulation was first starting to take off, I had a site bookmarked that I would often check called Dave's Video Game Classics, that served as mainly a hub of links and news updates on new emulators that had just been released. It was an exciting time because there was always so much to look forward to. Then one day I see an update about something called the MAME Action Replay Page, a new site that had just launched for replay movie files of games in MAME, a feature I had no idea existed in the newest version of MAME at the time (0.30). So I checked it out and immediately thought of the potential if the site took off in the future, the idea of having world-class replay files available for viewing was a very exciting prospect. And they were tiny downloads too! This was a big deal in the dialup days, ya know.

So obviously I wanted to help contribute to the site. I tried to think of what I could play that would make a cool recording. It was a few months prior that I had finally learned how to finish Black Tiger on one credit, a thing I could never do in the arcade but now had a second chance at thanks to emulation (I recall playing it on a standalone emulator someone developed solely for Black Tiger in mid-1997 (or earlier?) before it got integrated into MAME). I made a recording that finished the game without losing a life, but certainly wasn't optimized for score because I hadn't even thought about fully leeching it out. I think the score was in the low 800k range? Either way I was pretty pleased with it, so I emailed it to Zwaxy (there was no automatic submission yet). But then I noticed that there was also a score on the Japanese version, Black Dragon, that was way higher. I immediately felt kind of ashamed that my score was so low and apparently emailed Zwaxy to ignore this replay file I had just sent him. But then I found out that Black Dragon had a different scoring system that did things like award a million points for killing the last boss (I had never even tried the Japanese version prior to this because I didn't know it was different), so I said screw it, let the Black Tiger replay go up on the site. Either way, I thought it was a quality recording because I hadn't lost a life during it. Then the next day after it goes up, I find out somebody named Krool beat my score. I was mad my score had almost no time to shine, but at the same time the competition motivated me to try again and actually play it for score. I tried to work out the optimal amounts of time to spend leeching skeletons, and a few days later on February 10th, 1998, I submitted a score of 1.13 million. Two days later, Krool struck back with 1.17 million. I was really mad now but wasn't particularly excited about the methods required to play the game for score. That Feb 10 1998 recording might be down to 10th place now, but it's one of the oldest recordings on the site so I never want to overwrite it.

After that? I don't think I sent anything to MARP in the next four months (or at least nothing that's still on the scoreboard...) until I sent a Sly Spy score on June 11th, 1998. From then on I started following the site a lot more, since it now had an automated submission form. I started spending a lot of my spare time playing things in MAME, trying out games I'd never played before and didn't know very well. I guess you could call some of that leaderboard hunting, getting scores up before anybody else had! But then I guess a lot of have done that, lol.

Of course over time I've slowed down a bit and been in and out of the whole MAME thing, but I've always kept an eye on what goes on here. It's seriously hard to believe it's been 18 years! Where does the time go...
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